In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BOXING 43
uses yet another boxing metaphor to describe a necessary condition for
such success: "Just as a boxer requires elbow room for his punch, so a
writer requires the illusion of choice" (Shklovsky, 45).
It is above all the boxer's concentration, sobriety, and professionalism
(nobody builds metaphors around amateur boxers) that make him an
emblem of modernity. [see Sobriety vs. Exuberance] Thus, trying to stage
the traditional allegory of Death via techniques of estrangement in his
play Orphie, Jean Cocteau has Azrael, the "assistant" to Death, gesticulate
like the referee of a boxing match: "Azrael counts with one hand in
the air, like a boxing referee" (Cocteau, 62). For the philosopher Theodor
Lessing, the boxer belongs to a set of modern figures whose smoking
reveals a constant state of psychic tension: "When inner composure is
required, one always lights up a cigarette. In plays and films, this wellknown
situation always recurs. A couple of politicians who can influence
the rise and fall of their countries, a couple of bank executives conferring
about investments worth millions-each of them reaches for a cigarette.
The mountain climber who hovers over the abyss, the boxer setting out
for the decisive bout-they always drag on a cigarette" (Lessing, 142).
On the other hand, the intellectual's imagination also assumes that sobriety,
tension, and concentration are states of mind which the boxer
shares with his spectators. This is why boxing-match crowds have become
a normative ideal for the modern theater audience (Mittenzwei,
219). It is an almost trivial provocation to say that sports events, especially
boxing matches, will end up replacing the theater: "There are more
and more voices announcing that the drama in its present form is in
decline, ... that the drama has outlived itself as an art form. Those who
announce its death are burying it, in order to proclaim cinema, radio,
operettas, revues, and boxing bouts as its heir" (Vossische Zeitung,
April 4).
But even more important than any particular use of the boxing metaphor
is the ubiquity of this field of imagination in all types of discourse.
It appears, for example, in a best-selling introduction to contemporary
astronomy, The Internal Constitution of the Stars, in which the author,
A. S. Eddington, a physicist of international renown, compares the
method of his analyses to the cinematic device of slow motion. Slow
motion will transform the violence of certain movements into beauty and
harmony: "The motions of the electrons are as harmonious as those of
the stars but in a different scale of space and time, and the music of the